Monthly Archives: November 2017

To the untrained eye, Jeremy Gustafson’s 1,600-acre farm looks like all the others spread out across Iowa. Gazing at his conventional corn and soybean fields during a visit in June, I was hard-pressed to say where his neighbor’s tightly planted row crops ended and Gustafson’s began. But what distinguished this …

In the predawn chill a range rider moves through the sage grass and lupine. The scene — a woman on horseback, her cattle dog trailing behind her under a sky shockingly full of stars, and a quiet herd grazing between the aspens — is what Westerns are made of. But …

Surely the end was nigh. Up and down the Great Plains, from the Texas panhandle to the Dakota prairies, dust stripped the paint from their barns, the wheat from their fields, the money — what pitiful amount was left — from their pockets. “Today is just common hell, death and …